War is a romanticized version of adversity, where, no matter what's happening, or who is affected, we get our own way entirely.

Adversity is functional, not personal. Adversity is designed to produce change in a comfort-loving, change-resistant creature. The personal pain that it produces in us is how change feels to an emotional creature. But the surprising dissonance of change-in-process is purely functional, no matter how we feel about it personally.

Adversity's impingement of change upon us doesn't explain the ecstasy or agony of the emotional story we occupy. That query is between we, and our family of origin. It can be successfully healed only on those terms. Feelings need to be understood before they are acted upon, though we spend most of our time doing the opposite. To feel and act without self-understanding is pretense, which means to live in our personal world all the time, never occupying a big-picture place in which we question the truth, our truth, in effect making room for other people, and recognition of our own possible, frequently plausible error.

Violence of any kind-including emotional violence-is war fueled by a vengeful personal-ness insisting that reality has no right to make us feel so scared and uncomfortable, which justifies ignoring the safety of anything or anyone in order to escape that fear. That's the war-attitude.

Peace never claims or proclaims a right-of-way, only a right to negotiate, to be heard and respected, to make a claim-though that claim must remain tentative until, and if consent prevails.

Accountability removes the option of war by unmasking pretense-what oppression eats for dinner. As long as people are pretending, they aren't noticing all the crimes of excessive power - the deals behind closed doors, the compromises with freedom, the undermining of healthy dissent, the dismantling of people-helping practices, etc., whether those crimes occur in Washington or in our living rooms.

Pretense is living only in the personal realm, where all criminality seems sometimes necessary and inevitable for everyone, justifying anything we feel or do. Pretense binds us to magical child-places, where war - having our own way without negotiating with anyone affected-looks irresistibly appealing, particularly if we're afraid. Pretense is the core piece at the root of every psychological symptom/adversity. It's what hell is built upon. Pretense is the Moriarity of all crimes against humanity, wreaking the most confusion, havoc and mayhem by making everyone sheep who want to live in the same fairy tale.

Every one of us builds life at least partly upon pretending. It's no wonder we have so much trouble with fear.

Fear claims to address future time, shouting what might happen as if it already had, based upon how we're feeling at the moment of large startle.

But negative emotional predictions are notoriously inaccurate - 98 percent are misunderstandings - distorted as they are by the secret ulterior motive of escaping fear-put more accurately, the emotional experience of fear.

While sense shouts back, to turn around and look at the fear to see just how dangerous it really is. It only takes a second. We can be so impetuously rapid in urgency analysis.

Unseen, fear creates the worst nightmares that a panicky imagination can invent about what it's never really seen or examined. Running from fear takes us to this regressed place, where we fall into the hands of the worst consequences; so inattentive we are to reality.